Advertisers want to reach a highly-targeted audience at scale. Effective targeting of advertising or content or product offers typically requires tracking aspects of consumer behavior (visits to sites, content views, purchases, geo-location, etc.) combined with building, maintaining and using profiles of consumer behavior. These operations sometimes carry serious privacy concerns.
The urgency of the situation globally has grown as consumers are having an unprecedented personal relationship with devices, from PCs to iPhones. The technologies for targeting and tracking of consumers are getting more sophisticated. The advertising value chain across all channels is getting longer and more complex.
The prior art has focused generally on several different areas: do not contact databases, opt-out programs, opt-in programs, the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), and privacy proxies.
Do not contact databases have been used in the traditional mail and phone direct marketing space with some success. They rely on the presence of natural unique identifiers (name+address or a phone number). They are not applicable to digital media where unique identifiers are not present. In addition, they are a very crude tool and do not allow for fine policy-level decisions about which type of information can be used in determining whether to contact a consumer or the types of offers a consumer is interested in.
A variation of the do not contact database is an opt-out program such as the one that allows users of Google services to opt out of behavioral targeting. In a common embodiment, opt-out programs are implemented on the Internet through opt-out cookies stored in consumers' browsers. This is a highly unreliable approach as cookies disappear due to expiration, software updates, cookie store resets and other factors.
Opt-in programs work well when there is a unique way to identify users. Otherwise, they are typically implemented using cookies, which has all the problems described above for opt-out programs.
According to Wikipedia, the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, is a protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about browsing users. Typically, P3P is a machine-readable translation of human readable policies about websites' data management practices. A website uses P3P to set up policies that state the intended uses of personal information that may be gathered from site visitors. Typically, using their browsers configuration mechanisms, consumers decide what personal information they will allow to be seen by the sites that they visit. When a user visits a site their browser will compare what personal information the user is willing to release, and what information the server wants to get—if the two do not match, the browser takes an action, for example block a tracking cookie.
Privacy proxies are a technical solution for maintaining complete or partial user anonymity online.